The animal apparatus: taxonomic stratification as an Anglo-imperial technology

This article seeks to understand the cyclical, socio-political schema of technology in the global, colonial implementation of taxonomic hierarchy, as well as speciesism’s role in the beatification of technology during the liberalisation of Victorian England. Beginning by a snapshot observation of what appears to be a benign panorama of present-day London’s Hyde Park, the substratum of technologically enforced ecological atomisation is incrementally revealed to expose its insidiousness in unexpected places. To address this scape’s illuminated speciesism necessitates a return to its source; this article specifically spotlights the Great Exhibition—centred between the first and second half of the Industrial Revolutions—as a paragon of the Late Modern Period and the multivalent oppression and alterity to which it is inextricably linked. It is within the Great Exhibition that animals were not just regarded as tools for human enjoyment but as a lesser being to the machines which would subjugate them over the next century and a half. Finally, this article inspects the extant legacy of Western industrialisation which has bequeathed its individualist ethos to the modern State through particular modes of thought, exteroceptive manipulations, and the capitalization on neurobiological mechanisms, and, in many ways, has “worlded” global speciesism through the fecundity of colonialism.